FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Sandbox Percussion Announces 2026–27 Season

New York City (August 20, 2026) — The GRAMMY-nominated Sandbox Percussion, the first percussion ensemble to receive an Avery Fisher Career Grant, announced today its 16th season. The wide-ranging programming highlights collaborations with some of the most important composers of our time at major venues for contemporary music, including Steve Reich at Trinity Church, Christopher Cerrone at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Andy Akiho at 92nd Street Y.

Throughout the 2026–27 season, Sandbox Percussion also appears at Yale University, the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.), Chamber Music Northwest (Portland), and Schubert Club at Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and UCSD, San Diego, among other prestigious venues and festivals. All concert dates and details are listed below.  

A season highlight is the group’s residency at Trinity Church to celebrate Steve Reich’s 90th-birthday year. One of the major figures in American music and a world-renowned composer, Reich has influenced and guided the forward-looking ethic of Sandbox Percussion since the group was formed. The programs feature Tehillim, Traveler’s Prayer, Proverb, and Jacob’s Ladder—in collaboration with Trinity Church’s groundbreaking new-music ensemble NOVUS and singers from the Trinity Choir—as well as Clapping Music and Drumming, a masterpiece of early-1970s minimalism and a definitive work in the repertoire. Reich’s intricate music for percussion and voices will be complemented by select works from Caroline Shaw, Andy Akiho, Viet Cuong, Jessie Montgomery, and others.

Another highlight is the completion of Pentalateral and its premiere in full. The group’s ongoing collaboration with Andy Akiho builds on the success of the GRAMMY-nominated and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Seven Pillars, which Sandbox Percussion has presented around the world, from New York to Paris to Beijing. Pentalateral brings to fruition the artistic potential that was cultivated throughout the collaborative process for the earlier piece, this time with Akiho joining on steel pan to form a powerful quintet. The five musicians, who share a distinctive synergy, will continue to develop, complete, and record the hour-long piece through the end of this year and will take the full piece on tour beginning in spring 2027. The live performance will incorporate visual elements by Michael VQ, who also designed the lighting for the live performances of Seven Pillars. The movement “Pentalateral I” is available now on all streaming platforms.

In 2026–27, Sandbox Percussion returns to the 92nd Street Y on two separate occasions, expanding its relationship with the eminent Upper East Side center for arts, music, and culture, where Sandbox Percussion has appeared every year since 2024. In the fall, the group performs Seven Pillars, returning in the spring for the world premiere of Pentalateral, with Akiho. Additional performances of Pentalateral take place at University Musical Society, University of Michigan; and Chamber Music Northwest, Portland. Seven Pillars will also be performed at String Theory at The Hunter, Chattanooga.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sandbox Percussion presents two shows featuring selections from the celebrated composer Christopher Cerrone, whose music was featured on the ensemble’s GRAMMY-winning 2025 album Don’t Look Down, praised by Musical America as “imaginative, original, and addictively effective.”

Another season highlight is the world premiere of Concentric Circles, the latest piece for percussion and orchestra by Viet Cuong, a frequent Sandbox Percussion collaborator. His green energy and environment-themed percussion concerto Re(new)al, premiered by the Albany Symphony in 2018, has become a calling card for Sandbox Percussion. Concentric Circles will also be premiered by the Albany Symphony as part of its 2027 American Music Festival. 

Other 2026–27 highlights include a performance at the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C., where Sandbox Percussion revisits Michael Torke’s BLOOM, captured in a stunning 2024 recording; performances of Vivian Fung’s 2026 piece Goddess//Insect, featuring violinist Kristin Lee, at Music@Menlo, in the San Francisco Bay Area; and at Concert Nova, Cincinnati. A work for violin and percussion quartet, Goddess//Insect showcases the diverse interplay that is possible between instrumental forces. It was performed last season at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. 

At Schubert Club at Walker Art Center, Sandbox Percussion performs Simeon ten Holt’s minimalist masterwork Canto Ostinato (featuring Matthew Aucoin and Conor Hanick on piano), a piece shaped by softly chiming pulses and enthralling harmonic shifts. The group’s arrangement for percussion quartet and two pianos was performed at Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City festival, among many other venues. The recent recording with Metropolis Ensemble and Erik Hall (out now on Western Vinyl), was selected by NPR as one of “The albums and songs of 2026 that we love the most (so far).”

Sandbox Percussion’s upcoming album, available this fall on the Cold Blue Music label, features Prophecies of Fire, a work for percussion quartet by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams. “I’ve come to regard these four young men as the foremost interpreters of my percussion music,” writes Adams in his program note. “And I welcomed the invitation to compose Prophecies of Fire—a concert-length work—specifically for them.” The group gave the world premiere at Chamber Music Northwest in 2024.

Another album to be released this season features Christopher Theofanidis’ Drum Circles, a concerto for percussion quartet, performed by Sandbox Percussion with the Albany Symphony and David Alan Miller. The piece was commissioned by Robert van Sice, a mentor to Sandbox Percussion.

For details and updates about the season, please visit sandboxpercussion.com.

Sandbox Percussion: 2026–27 Season

• Sept. 23: Trinity Church, NYC — Reich Festival (show 1)
• Sept. 30: Trinity Church, NYC — Reich Festival (show 2)
• Oct. 3: Topeka Symphony — Viet Cuong’s Re(new)al
• Oct. 7: Trinity Church, NYC — Reich Festival (shows 3 and 4)
• Oct. 18: Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. — Michael Torke’s BLOOM
• Oct. 25: Concert Nova, Cincinnati — music by Vivian Fung, featuring Kristin Lee
• Oct. 30: Music@Menlo, San Francisco Bay Area — music by Vivian Fung, Gabriella Smith and Joan Tower, featuring Kristin Lee.
• Nov. 7: 92NY, NYC — Andy Akiho’s Seven Pillars
• Nov. 15: UMS Michigan, Ann Arbor — including selections from Pentalateral, with Andy Akiho
• Nov. 19: Trinity Church, NYC — Reich Festival (show 5), featuring Sandbox Percussion and their students
• Jan. 27 & 28: Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC — music by Christopher Cerrone
• Feb. 12: Peabody Institute, Baltimore — the music of Andy Akiho with the Peabody Percussion Group
• March 5: Schwarzman Center at Yale University — collaboration with Gandini Juggling
• April 9: Schubert Club at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis — Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato (with Matthew Aucoin and Conor Hanick)
• April 11: Chamber Music Tulsa
• April 24: 92NY, NYC — Pentalateral, with Andy Akiho (world premiere)
• April 27: String Theory at The Hunter, Chattanooga — Andy Akiho’s Seven Pillars
• May 2: Durham Medical Orchestra — Viet Cuong’s Re(new)al
• May 12: Chamber Music Northwest, Portland — Pentalateral, with Andy Akiho
• May 21: UCSD, San Diego — Pentalateral, with Andy Akiho
• June 10–13: Albany Symphony’s American Music Festival — Concentric Circles, by Viet Cuong (world premiere)

More about Sandbox Percussion

Hailed as “exhilarating” by The New York Times and “utterly mesmerizing” by The Guardian, the Brooklyn-based Sandbox Percussion champions living composers through its unwavering dedication to contemporary chamber music. The group was formed in 2011 by Jonathan Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum, and Terry Sweeney. Today they are established leaders in their field and, in 2024, became the first percussion ensemble to win the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant.

The quartet’s 2021 album Seven Pillars, featuring Andy Akiho’s title piece, was nominated for two GRAMMY Awards—Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and Best Contemporary Classical Composition. The feature-length work was described by The New York Times as a “brooding, thrilling, Mahler-length taxonomy of noise,” and “as pure as music gets.”

The group’s latest album is Don’t Look Down (PENTATONE, 2025), which “stretches and challenges the listeners’ ears” (BBC Music Magazine), featuring music by longtime collaborator Christopher Cerrone. It won the 2026 GRAMMY Award for Best Engineered Album, Classical (engineers Mike Tierney and Alan Silverman), and was nominated in two additional categories. Other recent releases include BLOOM, with music by Michael Torke (Ecstatic Records, 2024); and Past Life / Lifeline, with music by Ellis Ludwig-Leone (Better Company Records, 2024).

In 2025, Sandbox Percussion presented a genre-defying program on NPR’s popular Tiny Desk series, and, in 2024, recorded percussion music for its first feature film, the Oscar-nominated The Wild Robot (DreamWorks), scored by Kris Bowers. 

The members of Sandbox Percussion are on faculty at The New School’s College of Performing Arts—where the 12th Sandbox Percussion Summer Seminar takes place this season—and at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.

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